We’re not quite nose to tail yet, are we?

Google eating bulls penis in Korea if you want to see strut-eating at its worst where a parade of culinary scalp hunters eat something they consider to be so out there, the only way they can do it is via a series of dissembling jokes. This self-consciousness masked by bravado does such a disservice to foods which might appear odd to them and possibly terribly threatening to their sexuality, but are pretty basic bitch elsewhere. Clarissa Dickson Wright talked about the popularity of penis as a lunchtime street food in London in her TV series, Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner so it seems like we’ve become estranged from animal parts that remind us most of our own bodies. Organ meats can appear pretty visceral on the butchers slab but we’ve never seen our own human equivalents so there’s a corporeal disconnect on some level which may make it easier to cook and eat some parts of the animal than others, irrespective of how they actually taste.

I first ate bulls penis (hwangsoui seong-gi 황소의 성기) in Busan in the early eighties when I was a teenager staying in this southern Korean seaside city where my father was working. Based at Haeundae Beach where a smattering of international hotel guests were pandered to with tuna club sandwiches and neutered versions of local cuisine, I was constantly in trouble for roaming the streets, meeting local teenagers and playing hooky from the roster my parents had set. Starving hungry from hiking up Jangsan Mountain where we’d dare each other to annoy the soldiers who patrolled the fenced-off minefields, I’d snub the hotels five restaurants, return to the town, and slurp up bowls of goodness knows what from the hawker stalls along the promenade.

Chosun Beach Hotel, Busan

Having visited before, I was accustomed to eating meals where the ingredients were unknown and we were often invited into the homes of the locals my father worked with to eat, but that night we were served bulls penis it wasn’t much of a challenge to identify what was on the menu. Perched on a bench, sweating in the oppressive humidity of a late summer evening, what initially resembled snipped-up, flayed eels soon came into sharp focus. A bulls penis can be more than two feet long and cooks usually split along its urethra then slice the two halves into thick coins; diners can expect to be presented with an organ whose tough visceral membrane has been removed and then washed out as carefully as good chitlins are. Seen scaled up, you can appreciate a dick in all its hydraulic glory and marvel that erectile dysfunction isn’t more common in animals as well as humans. Mine still had part of its sigmoid flexure attached and the entire organ had been sliced longitudinally then boiled in a tenderising chili-infused stock before getting the hot coal treatment.

The dissection and boiling was bold but fresh penile tissue will contract and shrivel up when it hits the heat of the coals and without that tenderising bath you’ll end up with a dog chew. As a prelude to the bulgogi which was the main event, a pot of burning hot coals had already been slotted into a hole in the centre of the table and five or six penes were placed inside special cages that resembled lacrosse sticks. These rested on the coals and the basting sauce was mopped onto the meat using a brush with bristles as long as a hippies ponytail.

My penis wasn’t served with a garnish of culinary philosophy. There was no menu detailing chef’s conversion to nose to tail eating and the locals simply ordered, waited, then ate and nobody patted themselves on the back for being daring. I didn’t feel adventurous; the only thing I will not eat as a matter of course is porridge no matter how artfully it is presented because it is the devils work as far as I am concerned. The penile flesh was smokey hot, patched with char and packed a hefty, gluey bounce and fightback in the mouth. I chewed and chewed, I chewed some more and then I swallowed. A good eater should always swallow.

Penis is not a culinary treat by any stretch of the imagination. Even ten hours of cooking will fail to produce anything better than a brutalised gummy bear but texture is important to Korean diners. What I do share with these guys is a carelessness about eating the bits that make others blanch but I’m not referring to that daft nonsense where culinary scalp-hunters go in search of the most outrageous and rarest meals so they can tell you all about it via Buzzfeed or Vice. This always seems to other the cuisine of the nations concerned in the process and I really don’t want to do that.

Eating low on the hog was, and is something that I give little thought to, and not because I was a massively over-privileged and precocious food brat. It was simply how we cooked and ate, probably because I was nurtured in such a way as to expose me to homely cooking in different parts of the world and when I came back to Blighty I didn’t go back to the kinds of food other British children in my neighbourhood ate. It’s hard not to feel a certain loftiness about the nose to tail movement because thus it ever was with us. My Midlands relatives would certainly not think it appropriate to praise a child for eating black pudding, liver, tripe, scratchings and faggots, haslet or cow heel in that affected way you see now, but we’d get a clip round the ear if we left any of it. Nor would my broad tastes be regarded as anything other than expected by the Mexican people who took my catholic appetites for granted because it was simply unthinkable for a small child to exert any kind of control or influence over the family diet. This didn’t mean that they neglected our palates, far from it, but spiritual and religious attitudes towards nourishment and gratitude precluded fussiness.

Try turning down a bowl of menudo after someone has slaughtered their animal, broke its carcass down, cleaned miles of intestines then turned some of them into a soupy bowl of stew. Its eating was as communal as the slaughter, an act of reconciliation and thanks, driven by hunger and crowned by a sense of communal satiation. Waste was fiscally and morally unthinkable and superstition came into it too: in northern Mexico our housekeeper’s mother strongly believed that discarded leftovers, tossed carelessly on the ground ‘for the chickens’ would poison it for crops forever more.”Dios lo sabrá,” she’d scold me when I left a few scrapings on the plate and off she’d go to hunt down a scrap of tortilla to mop the plate with because the marriage of two leftovers in one meal turned it into a sacramental act.

So I don’t differentiate between high and low and I abhor snobbery in food. I don’t congratulate myself when I find something to cook from larder sweepings because it has always been this way. Delicious is delicious but I know that for some people, cooking with offal is a bigger deal, and believe me, there is no implied criticism contained in that statement, just a desire to shine a light on some of the animal parts that in the UK, you might not have encountered before.

I’ve enjoyed pots of chicken necks slow-braised then given a few minutes to blister under a grill, the flesh rubbed with aromatics for a final flourish; and assorted lights, viscera and skin of various critters have been fried, boiled, roasted and stewed then served up. Gelatinous pigs tails with blistered skin and soft as silk meat were served up on street corners near to the small units where the Guadalajaran glass blowers plied their trade. Thrust into a charcoal brazier until they ran with fat, these bronzed little corkscrews were placed inside a corn husk in order to catch the scalding hot drippings. If you’ve read Laura Ingalls Wilder, you’ll know this part of the pig is fought over and damn right it should be but curly tails are far more fun for a child to eat than their straighter brethren although better chefs than I have rhapsodised over the latter. Either way, the fact that the skin covering a pigs tail remains in place (unlike oxtail) means that each sticky-lipped bite contains a perfect ratio of skin to meat to partially broken down tendon and cartilage. Ask your butcher: they can get tails, necks and other bits for you, and they are usually super cheap.

There’s plenty of porky adventuring still to be had if you’re doing the Disney thing in Florida. Keep on driving north of the Disney complex where neutered interpretations of world cuisine threaten to kill gustatory curiosity and you’ll enter the classic Deep South. Stop at a country store and there on the counter will most likely be opaque jars full of murky red liquid where pickled pigs lips float and bump against the plastic walls. That spooky red liquor they float in isn’t blood by the way, it’s red dye which for some reason is traditionally used. Slightly bloated like all floaters are wont to be after a few days of immersion, they are less disturbing than you’d think in this age of plastic Hollywood trout pouts; basically what Babe the Pig would look like after a few months wed to a Kardashian. Regarded as a classic dive bar snack in Louisiana and immortalised by rappers VP and Breezybee in their 2014 rap, “Pig lips, boudin and chips” the eating of them is encoded within the DNA of many southerners who know to create a tension between chaw and crunch by matching them bite for bite with the jagged shards of potato crisps. Bash the bag of chips on the counter first, then bung in the lips and give the bag a good old shake. It’s working class panko, basically and if you can bear the idea of a pickled egg inside a packet of crisps, this isn’t that much of a leap, truly.

Want to try lips? It’s not easy to buy them ready-pickled in the UK but if you are US-based, you can order online from the Pickled Store. These aren’t Johnny Come Lately pig lips, the Pickled Store say, so don’t mistake them for a postmodern version all lubed up with irony so as to allow them free passage through your gullet without the triggering of cultural and class insecurities. These haven’t been fiddled with by a young buck of a chef seeking to make their mark on the world by introducing a new crowd to a reinterpreted old faithful. Your gorge will have to cope with their defiantly unreconstructed nature although their congruence with our own animal parts plays a role in ensuring good animal husbandry, surely? It’s harder to countenance animal cruelty when you identify with said animal unless you’re vegan and don’t believe in eating them at all, in which case this post is probably not for you. The company have been making their pigs lips to the same recipe since 1933 and their customer testimonials lay bare the love we all have for certain foods, no matter how peculiar they sound to others.

So will the nose to tail movement result in pigs lips moving out of the country store and gas station and onto our (higher-end) plates? Will ex-bankers running food trucks suddenly see the labial light? My money isn’t on bulls penes becoming the latest trailer snack in the UK, that’s for sure but pig lips and tails? They should be. It’s possible that the popularity of crispy pigs ears and porky heads on plates has groomed us to eat the other facial features solo. And I’m definitely comfortable with betting £50 on the likelihood of barbecued pigs tails becoming more popular over here.

Caldo de carda

So where else do they eat animal penes?

In Jamaica, cow cod soup is bull penis is stewed with bananas, rum and peppers and is used as an aphrodisiac.

In Bolivia, caldo de cardan is similar and is also a popular hangover cure. The soup takes its name because it is believed a bulls penis is similar to a cars drive shaft. Lengthy braising (ten hours +) concentrates the broth and helps develop taurine, it is believed, before beef, chicken and an entire lamb rib alongside boiled egg, rice and potato are added.

Malaysians eat beef torpedo soup to increase male virility. The thick and spicy broth is spiced with fennel seeds, cinnamon, garlic, and cloves and diners can enhance the symbolic potency of the dish by building it up with more bones and tendons.

A North African recipe serves the penis cut cross-wise, scalded, skinned, drained then boiled and sliced. Aromatics in the form of onions, garlic and coriander flavour the flesh as it is slow fried in oil and then added to vegetables, then braised for another couple of hours.

Yemeni Geed has chopped peppers, tomatoes and cumin and saffron added to the braise. The Yemenite Jews eat Gulasz z Penisa, a stew made with ram or bulls penis, too.

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2 thoughts on “We’re not quite nose to tail yet, are we?”

Why waste what you can eat. As long as the animal is treated fairly, then every part should be used. Unlike many western countries others around the world don’t waste anything. Our local butcher’s have recently started selling parts of the animal that had stopped being used in the 70s & 80s, such as offal, hearts etc.

I don’t particularly like these parts of the animal, but when hungry I’ll eat almost anything. Possibly everything, including my neighbors. HA!